The Wreck of the “Deutschland”

The Wreck of the “Deutschland”

Time brings many surprises, as I have long known, but I never imagined
being excited by the news that the nun’s famous cry in Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ was almost certainly not
uttered by Sister Henrica Fassbaender. But in fact Sean Street’s book
The Wreck of the Deutschland, which makes much of this incident, is
engrossing from start to finish. It has the further appeal of sounding
sympathetic. The author’s motivation throughout the fifteen years he
devoted to assembling and deploying his material has clearly been an
affectionate anxiety to tell the story fully and accurately rather
than to expose people and call down vengeance upon them. His attitude
to his chosen wreck is highly possessive, which naturally makes him
very selective. Other appalling naval disasters, the blowing up of the
Mosel at Bremerhaven, for example, affect him only in so far as they
have some connection with the Deutschland. In this case, the Mosel
is mentioned as being a sister-ship of the North German line which
perished at about the same time.